"Or a blessing to internally record a distress message, then we can have some people whose job it is to conjure those periodically and go hunt down people in trouble. Same problem, of course."

"That's really clever."

"I think it's time I had some long-term projects that aren't Mirror-related. Though then there's the problem that if they're important to do right I should really give them to the most capable people I know instead of treating them as a self-improvement project."

"Do we even have blessing design specialists in Milliways?"

"No. Father's very competent at it - "  - Findekáno didn't do it professionally but did delightful little custom ones as presents - "and if we're snatching Emily at some point there are a lot of them on my ship."

"Okay, so what's either not very important to do right, ideally suited to your skillset, or something there's no specialists we're realistically going to be able to set on the project in the foreseeable future?"

"Inconveniently, my skillset is knowing who'll be better at things than me and setting them to it! I could draw up a list of things my ship doesn't have any specialists in, check that against the multiverse to-do list - oh, we should check what Milliways considers to be the forked Findekáno's home world - at home I could do blessings, post them online, trust that all the holes there are to poke will be thoroughly poked overnight..."

"Crowdsourcing's handy. Alas."

"I'll at least draw up nice specs for the specialists once we snatch them."

Nod. "Probably easier than starting from nothing. How similar is it to other computer programming?"

"Pretty similar; you're interfacing with this annoying way-above-our-level black box with an API designed by kangaroo-lizard daeva, so probably even more deeply frustrating than programming is by default, but same skillset."

"Maybe I should pick it up."

"It's not a bad way to spend time! Especially now that we're not in Valinor and can start trying all these blessings that would've been illegal there, there's probably lots of low-hanging fruit at the moment..."

"What kinds of Vala silliness is there about blessings?"

"Nothing disruptive, nothing that'd let you subvert law enforcement, there's lots of fun VR stuff that got regulated out of existence for being too addictive..."

"Huh, Singularity has what sounds like pretty good VR but I haven't actually tried it and I don't know if the tech was capped like that."

"We should really pull all their tech and do a cross-check, fill in all the gaps - I bet their manufacturing is way ahead of ours, since we aggressively cheat on that..."

"You can find out how they built the lightleapers before I turned up."

"I am looking forward to it! The cultural differences must be - we wrote a series of plays on commission for the prototyping and advanced development of lightleapers, and then had a lovely festival where the plays were performed and the lightleapers made -"

"I would not be surprised if there was a festival involved on Singularity too."

"Getting used to Elves?"

"A bit, yes." Smooch.

Kisses! Not dwelling on his ex! Other lovely things!

He heads back and finds Findekáno. So, he says, I am satisfied that my Maitimo isn't evil and will run the galaxy basically exactly as you'd want the galaxy run. He is pretty okay with you thinking he's on Midnight's side because he wants Midnight to think that, so I have no comment on that, but you don't need to figure out how you can rein him in. It, uh, doesn't really work anyway, if it works with yours I think that's by actually changing the calculus about what is in his interests, or maybe the difference is that yours doesn't have principles to start with. 

Sigh.

It seems like absent someone happening to waltz in who'll be useful for removing Midnight from power, 'nudge him into being a good person' is all we've got, though everyone's happy to see you clear of it if that's what you want.

For a little while, maybe. Long enough to be sure I can do it without losing too much of myself.